[helios@talosone website]$

Prototype is a game for people who hate NYC

Prototype is a duology that is brutal to NYC citizens. You have a weird murder paramilitary killing the shit out of them. You have a virus killing the shit out of them. You have the personification of the virus (you!) killing the shit out of them in the most insane ways possible, like using them as surfboards on pavement, or eating them for health.

I remember playing these games back in college and saw them on sale on steam for like 5 bucks or something. Sure, why not. I had the itch to terrorize NYC again.

The first game is a janky mess. It requires a mod to not crash on PC. The story wasn’t anything special and god damn the character writing was incredibly edgy. Almost everybody was an over the top edgelord. The game itself was pretty awkward to actually play. A big problem is that dodging fucking sucked, and you had to do a lot of dodging. Another problem is that the game’s targeting system sucks ass and you have a VERY powerful jump + dive kick. So Mercer ends up flying around, magnetizing onto targets that aren’t the one you want. This makes a LOT of missions absolutely obnoxious if you couldn’t quickly dispatch important targets. There was also a strong focus on vehicle combat which felt terrible. vehicles were hard to hijack, handled like shit, and were easy to kill. The upgrades didn’t do much.

But it was also kinda fun. When the combat worked it felt fun. Flying around NYC as a horribly overpowered nightmare is a good time. Beating the crap out of PMCs is always a valid gameplay loop. Especially around the mid-game when you start getting strong enough that it takes quite the army to cause problems for you.

It was also very funny. Because you sit back and think for a moment. Where the fuck was NY government? Where were the feds? There was a catastrophic outbreak of a virus and the only responders are a PMC? They’re just off on vacation I guess. State governor comes back and shrugs?

I hate computers.

Prototype 2 still keeps the same theme of terrorizing NYC for kicks. As usual, the citizens get the worst end of the deal as they’re condemned to being health meat bags for you and irrelevant obstacles to run over to the PMC. The character writing is still very Edgelord City, but I personally liked Heller a lot more than Mercer. Angry Dad hunting for revenge is a lot more palatable honestly.

The combat is massively improved too. They definitely recognized that dodging fucking sucked in the first game and strove to make it feel as good as possible in the sequel. Now the primary combat flow is locking on to the main target and dodging relative to it with generous iframes, so you can deal with threats around you while sticking to your target. Vehicle combat was also significantly improved. Tank controls felt a lot more intuitive as the game better guessed what maneuvers you were trying to do. Giving them weapons you could rip off and use against them was also a fantastically fun addition. Their streamlining of the combat did make the game quite a bit easier, but it was fun, so I was ok with it.

My biggest frustration with the second game was the ending. It just kinda… Ends. You do some crazy virus attack which clears the whole city and then you look out towards the wasteland with Heller’s kid, credits roll. So like, whats Heller going to do? He’s the virus now. He had yet to deal with the contradictory problem of wanting to wipe out the virus while being the virus. The PMC was still there too. Did NY govt finally wake up and wonder why the PMC was murdering everybody for no reason?

I’m not sure I can recommend these games because anybody probably has a much more interesting backlog, but if you were ever feeling like some fast food quality action RPG where you get to terrorize NYC for fun, it’s a good time.

See Also #

• Atelier Yumia is a Video Game